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Still from A Passage to India, Procession led by elephant journeys to the Marabar Caves. Courtesy of Swank Motion Pictures.

Bard Graduate Center’s exhibition on the life of artist, designer, journalist, and colonial administrator John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) opens up questions about visual representations of the colonial encounter in India and its aftermath. Lockwood Kipling, a significant figure in his own time, is better remembered today as Rudyard Kipling’s father. He lent his considerable talents to poetry, journalism, book illustrations, editing, museum design, furniture-making, and the plastic arts more generally. In Screen India, a film series that accompanies the exhibition, we turn to cinema through the works of artists who came of age in the shadow of empire, war, and, decolonization to explore issues of identity, interracial intimacy, and friendship across the colonial divide. Set in the context of a post-imperial world caught up in its own predicament about cross-cultural relations, and coming seventy years after the end of British colonial rule in the India, Screen India presents a series of films by renowned directors from India, France, Italy, Britain, and the United States. Scholars from around the country will introduce each film followed by a screening.

Adults $8 / Students and Seniors $5. Five-event pass, $35. Gallery admission is free with a purchased ticket. For tickets and information visit: bgc.bard.edu


Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor of the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on the history of gender, marriage, and family in India, postcolonial thought and history, Indian intellectual history, and the history of Indian cinema. Majumdar’s books include Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Duke University Press, 2009), Writing Postcolonial History (Bloomsbury, 2010). She is co-editor of Civilizing Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2015) and From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford University Press, 2007). She is currently finishing a book entitled Art Cinema in India that analyzes the works of renowned Indian directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen to demonstrate unexpected alliances between art and popular cinema in India during a period of postcolonial political upheaval.

Sangita Gopal is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. She is author of Conjugations: Marriage and Film Form in New Bollywood Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and co-editor of Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi FIlm Music (Minnesota, 2008) and The Fourth Screen: Intermedia in India (Routledge, 2012). She is currently working on two monographs. The first is on the cinema of Ivory Merchant entitled, The Social Network: The Postcolonial Itineraries of Independent Film Production and the second, entitled Women’s work: Cinema, Media and the State in India looks at gendered networks of production in India.


October 13, 2017: Ghare Baire (Home and the World), 1984. Directed by Satyajit Ray. Introduced by Rochona Majumdar. 120 minutes.

November 3, 2017: A Passage to India, 1984. Directed by David Lean. Introduced by Sangita Gopal. 164 minutes.

November 17, 2017: The River, 1951. Directed by Jean Renoir. Introduced by Priya Jaikumar. 99 minutes.

December 1, 2017: Bhowani Junction, 1956. Directed by George Cukor. Introduced by Debashree Mukherjee. 108 minutes.

January 5, 2018: India: Matri Bhumi, 1959. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Introduced by Tom Gunning. 90 minutes.

We are also pleased to extend complimentary need-based community tickets by request to all ticketed events. To learn more, please email [email protected].

Leading support for Public Programs at Bard Graduate Center comes from Gregory Soros and other generous donors.